


Ready Player One?

by themorninglark



Series: tripping over time [3]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Era, Character Study, Gen, Introspection, Kenma's birthday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-15
Updated: 2015-10-15
Packaged: 2018-04-26 13:49:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5007115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/themorninglark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The smell of grass on the air reminds Kenma of their childhood. Funny how it turned out, that the path of least resistance would involve so much physical exertion, would involve him tramping loose soil beneath his feet and getting hit in the face with balls he couldn't catch.</p><p>Sometimes, it involved falling, and getting to his feet again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ready Player One?

**Author's Note:**

> I don't quite know how to express how I feel about Kenma and how important he is to me. So I poured it into this fic. 
> 
> Happy birthday, Kenma ♥

/

 

This isn't the way the world works, Kenma knows, but he's okay with it. It's exhausting to be anything else.

"You want to quit," says Kuroo.

The wind's blowing his dark hair in his eyes. He's let his fringe grow out like a curtain, the better to hide himself behind; he can't be bothered to style it the way Kuroo does his, so he lets it be, like he's used to. Letting things go, letting them slide. Going with the flow. Sitting on the steps by the bridge just because Kuroo dragged him there.

He looks down at his sneakered feet. Kuroo's silent. He always knows how to be infuriatingly silent.

"What's the point?" Kenma mumbles. "They think I'm slow. They don't want me on the team."

Kuroo stuffs his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Turns his gaze up and out, towards the dying light of day's end.

"Don't quit."

Kenma rests his head on top of his knees and hugs them tighter into his chest.

He doesn't bother arguing with Kuroo. He doesn't need to be told what he's good at, because the thing is, he knows, and he also knows that it's true that he's slow at cleaning up and putting the balls away, and he doesn't like to stretch too hard for a block sometimes if he doesn't feel like it, and Kuroo knows this too. Better than anyone else, really.

So Kuroo says everything he has to say, like it's fact, and Kenma feels the balmy evening grow warmer round his face, thinks about the fighter and the superhero that he is not.

It's easy to put down the PSP and walk away when he gets tired. But when he has a team relying on him, he can't do that.

Kuroo glances at him at that moment, through narrowed eyes like still waters, running deep.

"You'll definitely make our team strong."

Kenma frowns.

"You'll be our backbone. Our brain," says Kuroo. "And more than that. If you stay, you'll become the heart, Kenma."

Kenma's low voice comes out like a muffled sigh in the arms of his jacket.

"Stop saying things like that. It's weird."

Kuroo smiles. His expression says it all, without words. _Well. I wonder._

Behind them, the sky's lavender-coloured, deepening into the brilliant, bruising violet of late spring's sunset, and their shadows are growing longer. The smell of grass on the air reminds Kenma of their childhood. Funny how it turned out, that the path of least resistance would involve so much physical exertion, would involve him tramping loose soil beneath his feet and getting hit in the face with balls he couldn't catch.

Sometimes, it involved falling, and getting to his feet again.

 

* * *

 

 _Quiet._ That's what they say about him.

He listens, takes in words and gazes and lets them sink under his skin; he threads himself through spaces wide and narrow, ghosting like the shadow of a stray thought. Sometimes, he waits. Sometimes, he disappears as soon as anyone turns his way.

Not for him the ragged, reckless flight on wings, torn and renewed; not, for him, the sun -

Temperate days when the wind in the leaves is all he hears. That's fine. That's all he needs.

 

* * *

 

 _You were wrong,_ says Kenma to Kuroo on their way home, months later, when winter's well upon them and the snow falls in Nerima, upon rooftops and doorsteps and fields where their sneakers leave a trail of footprints.

Here in the suburbs, they're miles away from the Christmas season's dazzling lights. Kenma likes it like this. He's never thought of himself as a Tokyo boy, a city boy; he's never thought of himself as anything much other than a kid who's still trying to figure out school and people, let alone the rest of the world.

Eyes on his game, Kenma's murmur is almost an afterthought.

_It's not me that's strong. It's the team._

Yaku's quick reflexes. Kai's stable receives. Tora's strength. Kuroo's everything.

_Well…_

Without missing a beat, Kuroo steers Kenma away from an oncoming lamppost and a puddle of snow-turned-grey-slush at his feet. Kenma hates it when his socks get wet.

_I said you'd make the team strong. I didn't say the rest of us wouldn't. It's all of us._

And Kenma, absorbed in pressing buttons, hears what Kuroo's saying, but it isn't until later when he's at home airing out his damp-soaked sneakers and hanging up his coat that it sinks in. He thinks about the parts of a whole coming together. He thinks that, maybe, while he's been keeping his eyes peeled, learning all of them and their quirks and playstyles, they, too, have been learning his.

It's a little bit strange, the thought that anyone would find him worthy of learning.

He shuts the door to his room, slowly and quietly, and lets the comfort of his solitude encase him.

 

* * *

 

On the day that Tora tells him his hair makes him stand out, Kenma ditches Kuroo and heads straight to the hairdresser's after school. Ten minutes down the road, he realises his feet are taking him straight to his usual place.

He turns around, walks towards the station and gets off at Ikebukuro, in search of anonymity.

With a minimum of words, he finds himself seated in a cushy chair at the back of the first salon he stumbles into. His shoulders slouch. He fiddles with his fingers, restless; reaches for his phone in his bag, and lets the familiar weight of it calm him down. He peers at his reflection through strands of fine, flyaway hair, and sighs a sigh so small that no one else can hear it.

When the stylist runs her fingers through his choppy ends and asks him what he'd like to do with his hair today, the first thing out of Kenma's mouth is, "Something that doesn't make me look like Sadako."

"Hmm… have you ever considered dying your hair? It would really lighten your whole look."

"Anything's fine," Kenma's quick to mutter. "Just don't cut it."

He takes a sip of the green tea they've served him, picks up his phone and pretends to be absorbed in reading his text messages.

The stylist gets the hint, and stops trying to talk to him.

Kenma doesn't really think much of the whole thing. It takes way too long. That's the main thing he remembers. He barely even notices how he looks, before, during, after; his game keeps getting interrupted, but he manages some stretches of playtime during the interminable period of sitting under the space helmet dryer.

There's a funny kind of alchemy about it, the science of walking into a hair salon one person, and coming out another a few hours later. He's heard that that's how it's supposed to work, anyway.

Kenma isn't really sure that he's all that different, but when Tora ruffles his hair the next day and he hears Yaku comment that he certainly fits in more than when he first joined, he's content. That's enough, for now.

 

* * *

 

The thing about the line that Kenma walks is, it's more nebulous than people realise.

He keeps to himself. He watches the world. He has opinions. He cares about _others'_ opinions, _just_ enough to let them bug him, not enough to really put up much of a fight, if it comes down to the wire. It's too much trouble, he thinks, and he retreats into a shell that's like a soap bubble, fragile and transparent enough for him to see out of. If anyone so much as breathes on it, it fades away like it was never there.

Only the faintest trace of a _pop_ , a tingling on his skin to remind him that he tried to hide, and that the world found him anyway.

The breeze on his cheek from the ceiling fan is warm. The classroom is full of noises, high-pitched chatter, desks slamming shut and the steady hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. There's the universe beyond, trees of sakura and blue skies with puffy white clouds and seas that join to oceans, and here, right here, this concrete space.

And even smaller, within - just a fraction of this school, of this class - of his volleyball team, there's - him. _Kozume Kenma._

It's a pain sometimes, getting by, but life can be kind of interesting, in its own way.

He likes to think he craves invisibility. The truth is, he's too cowardly to go out and seek it; it takes a certain kind of courage, he's learned, to really be okay with never being noticed. He's not that kind.

Behind a screen of pixels, he is real. He dares, perhaps, to be more; his hesitation's two steps forward, one step back.

(One and three-quarters, sometimes.)

 

* * *

 

 _From: Hinata Shouyou_  
_Subject: YOU WANTED TO QUIT?????  
_ _WHAT?!??!??!!!!! YOU WHATTT_

It's lightning-quick, as Shouyou's replies always are. Talking with Shouyou is like trying to catch a firefly, or trapping the sun's rays in his bare hands; even if Kenma pins him down for a second, he simply escapes between the cracks of his fingers. And yet -

His light is hypnotic, and Kenma can't help chasing it.

 _To: Hinata Shouyou_  
_Subject: (no subject)_  
_yeah…  
_ _well, that was last year._

 _From: Hinata Shouyou_  
_Subject: NO WAY_  
_KENMA  
_ _YOU CAN'T QUIT!!!!!_

 _To: Hinata Shouyou_  
_Subject: (no subject)  
_ _im not going to_

He throws his phone down on his bed and gets changed out of his uniform. Plugs in his devices to charge, in their ritual order: PSP, aging first-gen DS, iPod. Hears his phone buzz again, and thinks, _Shouyou_ , with a smile. He wonders what he'll have to say next. It isn't usually difficult to imagine.

As Kenma hangs up his jacket, it occurs to him that he's never said what he just said before. Not like that in words, anyway; it's not like he ever said to Kuroo, _I won't quit_. He'd just - hung around. Kept chipping away at it, quietly, until it became a habit, just like everything else he did.

When he got down to it, quitting would probably have been more troublesome than going on. If he quit, what would he say to Kuroo? What would he do with himself after school? Would he throw out his volleyball stuff, or keep it out of some odd sentimentality? Was Kenma even the sort of person to be sentimental?

No, it's hard to answer questions you've always been able to avoid before -

Easier for him to stick with the path he's already found himself halfway down, in a world that's inscribed with parameters and rules that he's come to know, albeit by accident.

Saying it to Shouyou, it feels strange, like a kind of commitment. Kenma's used to tiptoeing round the absolutes with his soft, careful tread, wary of the binding nature of things spoken aloud; when he speaks, he weighs his words carefully. He knows they mean _something_.

_I guess I'm not quitting._

Even silently, in his mind, the thought tolls like a banner-red proclamation.

 

* * *

 

The sound of dusk that Kenma's used to is a low hum, a stereo _whoosh_ in his ears and the muted shuffle of the meandering crowd, wandering on and off the Tokyo metro.

There's a view from the window that he's come to know, over the years. Telephone wires, birds flocking overhead, bicycles in their untidy rows and a canvas of city-grey goodbyes. Streets that wind themselves round train tracks in their crisscrossed patchwork. The skyline on the horizon.

Lying back in his seat, resting his head against the cool metal, Kenma thinks about nothing in particular. The rhythmic, gentle rocking of the train carriage lulls him into a comfortable familiarity.

This day is ending. Tomorrow will come in its wake, as tomorrow does.

It's a wilderness out there in the world, but in here, in the steady beat of his heart and his quiet breathing, Kenma finds his safe spaces somehow.

 

* * *

 

"See you tomorrow," says Kuroo, waving at Kenma as they part ways by the intersection near the _combini_ where they always stop to get an after-school snack, and Kenma lifts his eyes from his PSP long enough to nod in response.

His front door opens with a gentle creak. The _tadaima_ he murmurs as he kicks off his shoes is quiet, hanging in the air; his parents probably aren't home yet, so it's just him for the rest of the afternoon, which suits him fine.

His post-practice ritual hasn't changed for years. He should go take a shower. Faced, however, with an impasse he knows intimately, the iron wall of inertia and _it's too hot to move_ and the need to drag himself downstairs, Kenma flops down on his chair instead, and feels the sharp corner edge of his apple juice carton sticking into his side from a pocket of his backpack.

He takes it out, pierces the metal foil with the pointy end of the straw and takes a long sip.

It's cool today. Apples make him think of autumn, of red maple leaves that crunch beneath his feet; his favourite season - not too hot, not too cold. October's well upon them now, but there are days, still, when the weather's sweltering, and a sheen of sweat sticks to his skin. If he closed his eyes now, he could pretend that summer lingered on in stolen moments. _Here_ , by the bicycle parking lot where the dappled glow of the midday sun falls; _there_ , when he's setting his bag down in the club room, and hears his phone buzz with a text from Shouyou.

But the passage of time draws on. _Two steps forward. One step back._

Kenma doesn't fight it. He's never had the inclination to fight anything in the first place, much less something so inevitable anyway. He knows what awaits him in the morning. He has an inkling that _seventeen_ will feel like any other day, except with cake and apple pie.

And there's a sweetness in that, in his tentative edging forward, in the knowing that he's another year older and things are still _okay_ , that he's made it this far - maybe things are better, even, than they were last year -

There are heroes and monsters in the real world too. Kenma is content to be neither. The easy life of an NPC seems so much more appealing.

But there are some days when he feels like even an NPC could be a hero, in his small way, and that's less scary of a thought than it used to be.

 

 

_Ready player one?_

_..._

_Yes._

 

_/_

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is the [backstory of Kenma's hair](http://haikyuu819.tumblr.com/post/128409063530/tsukishimacest-haikyuu-volume-4-bonus), if you're curious and haven't seen it before.
> 
> Come talk to me about Kenma on Twitter at @nahyutas! Coherence not guaranteed.


End file.
